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AWARDS & HONORS

Michael Blanding's new book "The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps" was named as one of NPR's 2014 Good Reads.

Karen Coates and Jerry Redfern's new book "This Way More Better" received the 2014 Best Travel Book Award and Best Nonfiction Award in the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Their book “Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos,” was a finalist for three prestigious prizes: the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Montaigne Medal, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Book Award.

Schuster Institute has received a 2014 Clarion Award for its article "Indonesia's Palm Oil Industry Rife with Human Rights Abuses," July 22, 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek, in the category of Magazines - Feature Article, External Publication - Circulation of 500,000 or more - Current News.

Erin Siegal McIntyre was named "Freelancer of the Year" by the Guild Freelancers and received three 1st place awards in 2014 for her reporting on immigration.

Madeline Drexler has been honored with a Grand Gold Award for Best Article of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). Her article, "Guns & Suicide: The Hidden Toll," (Spring 2013, Harvard Public Health), was selected out of 75 entries.

AFFILIATIONS

The Front Page

"They Steal Babies, Don't They?"

Exclusive U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa documents received through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal how humanitarian adoptions in Ethiopia metastasized into a mini-industry shot through with fraud, becoming a source of income for unscrupulous orphanages, government officials, and shady operators—and was then reined back in through diplomacy, regulation, and a brand-new federal law.

Read our new report on fraud and corruption in international adoption, "They Steal Babies, Don't They?" and find links to all the documents we received, published here for the first time.

NEW BOOKS

The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps

When Beinecke librarian Naomi Saito found an X-Acto knife on the floor of a reading room, alarm bells rang in her head. The library where Saito works is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Saito, library colleagues, and security staff soon identified the owner of the knife. He was still in the library–a dealer in rare maps named E. Forbes Smiley III.

When they confronted Smiley, he'd already slipped into his jacket pocket a map he'd lifted out of a book. He'd had no need for the X-Acto. The book's 400-year-old glue had long loosened its contents.

Eventually, Smiley admitted to stealing millions of dollars worth of rare maps and went to prison.

In "The Map Thief," Blanding reports on the crime, the man behind the crime, the history of specific maps, and map-making. Smiley granted Blanding only two interviews and then went silent. Although he told Blanding much of his story, mysteries remain and maps are still missing.

Eternal Harvest: Forty Years Later, Tens of Millions of U.S. Bombs Dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War Continue to Devastate Laotians

What most of us don't know about the Vietnam War is that the United States military, in its efforts to quash the Communist insurgency in the North and stop supply routes connecting North and South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, dropped tens of millions of bombs on the people and landscape of neighboring Laos. Beginning in 1964, American forces bombed Laos on average once every eight minutes for nine years.

“Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos" (ThingsAsian Press, December 1, 2013) is a new book by Schuster Institute Senior FellowsKaren Coates and Jerry Redfern dedicated to telling this story. In it, the bombing missions over Laos during the Vietnam War and their devastating effects are described through the experiences of Laotians and people on the ground there trying to clear the land of unexploded ordnance (UXO).